Camera Phone Is 10 Years Old

Lady In Red
Originally uploaded by trashNYC.

It was late at night and people were hungry so .., oh wait no thats the caeser sald story.

Camera phone pioneer ponders the impact

"There's always a way to capture memories and share it," he said. "You go to a restaurant, and there's a birthday and suddenly everyone is getting their camera phones out. It's amazing."

If Kahn feels a bit like a proud father when he sees people holding up their cell phones to snap pictures, there's good reason: He jury-rigged the first camera phone while his wife was in labor with their daughter.

"We were going to have a baby and I wanted to share the pictures with family and friends," Kahn said, "and there was no easy way to do it."

So as he sat in a maternity ward, he wrote a crude program on his laptop and sent an assistant to a RadioShack store to get a soldering iron, capacitors and other supplies to wire his digital camera to his cell phone. When Sophie was born, he sent her photo over a cellular connection to acquaintances around the globe.

A decade later, 41 percent of American households own a camera phone "and you can hardly find a phone without a camera anymore," said Michael Cai, an industry analyst at Parks Associates.
[...]
Mix in the Internet's vast reach and the growth of the YouTube generation, and the ubiquitous gadget's influence only deepens and gets more complicated. So much so that the watchful eyes on all of us may no longer just be those of Big Brother.

"For the past decade, we've been under surveillance under these big black and white cameras on buildings and at 7-Eleven stores. But the candid camera is wielded by individuals now," said Fred Turner, an assistant professor of communications at Stanford University who specializes in digital media and culture.

The contraption Kahn assembled in a Santa Cruz labor-and-delivery room in 1997 has evolved into a pocket-friendly phenomenon that has empowered both citizen journalists and personal paparazzi.

Again big brother is not a bunch of video cameras. Big brother is a dude that says he is trying protect you and your family. The surveillance is done by friends and family as the fink on you for not following what BB says should be how you live your life.